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Can two new books save the internet from its own success?

Monopolies love, and more or less own, the internet – but Pat Kane believes its revolutionary potential is not yet lost

See no evil: protesters bring Google’s private buses to a halt

Robert Galbraith Reuters

By Pat Kane

WHEN, and why, did it all go wrong for the digital idealists? Douglas Rushkoff’s Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus pinpoints one moment: the end of 2013 in San Francisco. Protesters had been rallying against the effects Silicon Valley companies were having on the life of the city, raising rents and costs for those who lived outside the gated communities of the technorati. In Oakland, some started throwing rocks at Google’s employee-only buses.

This isn’t how the internet was supposed to end up. Since the early 1990s Rushkoff has been an evangelist for this technology, seeing in it a way of redistributing power, voice and resources. But it has become as readily associated with oligarchs like Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg as it has with campaign sites like Avaaz, networked movements and political parties like Spain’s Podemos or the Pirate Party in Iceland.

After the last financial crash, and before the next, can those who want their enterprises to serve society, rather than capital markets, see their way to a new model? Rushkoff – and Arun Sundararajan with his more focused essay The Sharing Economy – have plans to redeem networked society.

Rushkoff’s fascinating move is to locate the original wrong turn, not in market deregulation, or the accelerations of financial software, but in the 13th century.

He identifies a golden moment, after the Crusades, when returning soldiers brought the bazaar back to Europe. This was “a peer-to-peer economy, something along the lines of eBay or Etsy”, quips Rushkoff, where “attention to human relationships promoted better business”.

“The 13th-century bazaar was ‘a peer-to-peer economy, something along the lines of eBay or Etsy’“

The merchant class that arose from these trades threatened the aristocracy, whose response was to tax and break up the bazaars, and bestow monopolistic rights on land and trade routes to favoured merchants. Thus began the long march to the incorporated company – from workers “selling their wares to selling their hours”.

The idiosyncratic currencies enabling these face-to-face markets were replaced by national currencies whose core function, Rushkoff notes – with an eye on current turmoils – “was to make wealthy people more wealthy”.

Rushkoff believes that we are reacquiring an appetite for more human-scale economies, ones that keep cash circulating among users rather than salting it away into corporate reserves. A “digital distributism” is his proposal.

Bitcoin and its successors show viable currencies can be launched without state bodies, supported by the technical commitment of their users. Crowdfunding sites like Kickstarter and Indiegogo, and platforms that help people utilise their physical assets like Airbnb and Lyft, both establish direct, personal relations between services and their users.

Before we get too carried away, however, we should also consider the ride service Uber (and both authors do, at some length). Combining our underused cars, our love of apps and the need for that extra “gig” in the age of austerity, Uber is indeed a techno-bazaar, making value out of self-employed, stuff-cluttered lives.

But Uber’s explicit plan is to automate all those cabbies out of business, as self-driving cars become the norm. A strange “human-scale” economy, this, that so airily imagines millions of humans as replaceable wetware.

Should we really brand this “the sharing economy”, as Sundararajan’s title suggests? The term lends a rosy glow to a range of business models, some of which can be pretty hard-edged.